it does feel strange to see Nvidia like this for so long. Yes, they have provided some fine gaming cards over the past two/three years, like the first DX10 card, the 8800GTX, which ATI couldn't match with its power and heat hog 2900XT, then they brought us the excellent and affordable 8800GT and the cheaper 9600GT and now they have the GTX 275 which I've read is good competition against ATI.
But then you look at the GPU failures, the refusal to bring 10.1 cards to market therefore holding the gaming industry at DX10 becasue that's the lowest common denominator, the rebranding of old cards, and now this DX11 "Hey, look, a three headed monkey!" kinf of talk.
Sure it can happen to anyone, Intel had the Pentium Fdiv problem back in the early nineties, the Pentium 4 prescott a few years ago, but they're fine otherwise. ATI really hasn't had a bad graphics card like Nvidia's 5 series which were terrible with DX9, and they have always invested more in video quality.
For the past few years magazine reviews give the best video quality to ATI (HQV tests), which makes it a favourite for the ever growing media center business, and now they are very competitive in the gaming department too. Their current success is comparable to their 9600/9700/9800 series from 2002/2003. Their next series X700/800 were comparable to that of Nvidia (remember the good X800 GTO, X850XT, etc), then came the X1xxx series, which were again competitive in the midrange, the HD2xxx were only competitive in the midrange (though transition to DX10, but hey, perhaps they were actually working on it, as we can see in the next series which brought DX10.1), the HD3xxxx brought them back with good performance and good value for 90% of gamers, and then they blew the price dogma with their fabulous HD4xxx series.
I'm waiting for the 5xxx series. Just to be clear, until now I was a loyal Nvidia customer, never had any problems, but when it came to doing a media center I chose an ATI HD4550, HDMI, passively cooled, amazing 8w idle and 18,5w full load, full HD decode, and can even play Need for Speed most wanted at 1024x768 with everything maxed - not bad for a card that cost me 39 euros / 57 dollars.)
And if Nvidia doesn't get their research straight, my money to replace my noisy 8800GT Turboforce Edition will go to ATI. Nvidia has managed to get a hold of the "gamers" marketing strategy until now, but ATI set an excellent precedent with the 4 series and the 5 looks very promising. What will be left to Nvidia ? Research ? Matrox is also in a niche and nobody talks of them in the mainstream anymore. Hope that doesn't happen; we need competition; without it we have slow development, suboptimal products and high prices.